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In dreams

Perhaps understandably, de Icaza and the other members of the Mono team prefer not to see things this way. de Icaza is an enthusiast and long term advocate of Microsoft technologies, his inspiration for the original design of GNOME was Microsoft's component architecture, he wanted Mono to be the framework for building GNOME desktop applications, and is 'drooling' over the prospect of Silverlight/Moonlight becoming the ultimate platform for developing cross-platform desktop solutions.

Miguel de Icaza The purpose of Silverlight has evolved over time. Originally, Silverlight was intended as a substitute or replacement for Flash. With the announcement of Silverlight 4 the scope has grown, as de Icaza expresses it, "to turn Silverlight into the universal platform for building cross platform applications." de Icaza sees Moonlight becoming a vehicle whereby "we can join forces with Windows/MacOS developers to create the next generation of desktop applications," and the prospect is enticing.

"I think I speak for the whole Mono team," he says, "when I say that this (Silverlight 4) is exciting, fascinating, challenging and feels like we just drank a huge energy boost drink."

The problem for GNU/Linux desktop developers remains the same. Mono and Moonlight do not excite because they are closed technologies and are encumbered by patents. But it stretches further than this. Duplicating Microsoft technologies (where they allow you to) is not often the motivation for becoming involved with free and open source software.

Moonlight and Silverlight 4 may fulfill a Microsoft ambition to lock the desktop and the Web into Windows via .NET, but this is not an ambition likely to be shared by many free software developers. Mono and Moonlight serve a useful purpose, which is to allow access to Microsoft technologies for migration and interoperability purposes, but the Mono developers want something more than this. They want a world where Mono and Moonlight are the base technologies for developing applications for the desktop. However the ability to "join forces with Windows/MacOS developers to create the next generation of desktop applications" is only useful if the underlying technologies are free and open, and are likely to remain free and open, and this is where the ambition of Mono and Moonlight falls down.

The legal confusion that surrounds Microsoft's agreements with Novell stand in stark contrast to the agreement between the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) and Microsoft which gave the Samba developers the right to access and use the SMB/CIF protocols.

Next: A sliver of light

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